July 25th, 2017 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Seagate and Micron co-launched SAS SSDs at the end of 2015 in a partnership to accelerate sales of enterpise SSDs for the two companies. In the initial review, we looked at the 1.6TB capacity in the light endurance category which has an edurance rating of three drive writes per day (DWPD). Seagate offers 1200.2 SSDs across five endurance categories ranging from 1DWPD to 25DWPD. In this review we stick with the mainstream mixed workload light endurance category but pick up with the highest capacity 3.84TB model.

July 24th, 2017 by Adam Armstrong

Much like the recently reviewed Dell Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx, today we will be looking at the traditional HHHL version of this NIC. The NIC is designed to add high bandwidth with low latency and a high message rate with its 25GbE transfer rate (though it is compatible with 10GbE as well). The NIC is ideal for next-generation web, Cloud, data analytics, database, and storage platform use cases.

July 20th, 2017 by Adam Armstrong

The Dell Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx is a dual port network interface card (NIC) designed to deliver high bandwidth and low latency with its 25GbE transfer rate. What is interesting about this NIC is that it is designed specifically for the Dell PowerEdge line of servers (specifically the R630, R730, R730xd, and R930), slotting into the motherboard without taking up a traditional PCIe slot. The Dell Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx aims to bring about all of the performance promise of the PowerEdge servers while not letting networking be the bottleneck that slows everything down.

July 17th, 2017 by Lyle Smith

The DiskStation DS1817+ is another comprehensive 8-bay NAS system from Synology designed to centralize storage for small growing businesses. At the center of the DS1817+ is a Quad-core 2.4GHz CPU with an AES-NI hardware encryption engine and up to 16GB in dual-channel DDR RAM, components that should allow the NAS solution to work well in most demanding environments (upwards of 1,179MB/s in sequential reads). The DS1817+ can store a maximum of 80TB in storage on a single system using eight 10TB drives, which can be upped to a massive total of 180TB via expansion units. This scalable solution also features four 1GbE LAN ports.

July 14th, 2017 by Brian Beeler

Huawei launched their OcenStor Dorado V3 last fall during their HUAWEI CONNECT annual event in Shanghai, China. We were on hand for the launch and were able to learn first hand of Huawei’s vision for the next generation of SSD adoption in the enterprise. Huawei describes this as the fourth generation of flash storage, where all flash arrays are not only able to take full advantage of SSD media to deliver excellent latency; they’re also able to leverage data reduction technologies to ensure cost-effective capacity delivery targets are made in a relatively small rack footprint.

July 14th, 2017 by Adam Armstrong

Thin Clients have long been used as a way to deliver computing power to multiple users for a low price. NComputing has taken this concept to a new level with the release earlier this year of its RX300. The RX300 uses a Raspberry Pi 3 platform as its base. This alone makes it the lowest initial cost thin client to date while still offering enough performance for most general uses in SMB and education. The thin client also comes with built-in transparent USB redirection achieving unparalleled peripheral support, WiFi, and optional access to Raspbian Linux OS managed by the IT admin.

June 29th, 2017 by Adam Armstrong

Earlier this year, Micron launched its new 5100 SSD family of data center drives. The family had three flavors of drives, the ECO for read-intensive workloads such as video streaming, the PRO for latency-sensitive transactional databases, and the MAX for write-intensive logging applications. In January we reviewed the ECO, finding that while it lacked in performance in some of our workloads, it did offer things such as up to 8TB (making it an ideal HDD replacement) and FlexPro firmware. For this review we will be looking at the 5100 MAX.

June 27th, 2017 by Lyle Smith

The NETGEAR ReadyNAS 628X is an 8-bay NAS designed for growing small and medium size businesses and is part of the NETGEAR's 620X line of high-performing NAS solutions. We previously reviewed the RN626X (the 6-bay model), which features the same premium build, and similar hardware and features: an Intel dual core server processor and is equipped with built-in dual 10Gb Ethernet ports, unlimited snapshots, disaster recovery and comprehensive--yet easy-to-use--file sharing capabilities.

June 23rd, 2017 by StorageReview Enterprise Lab

Dell recently announced the Wyse 3040, its smallest, yet still powerful, thin client to date. Size wise, it is only 1.1 inches tall, 3.75 inches wide and deep, and weighs 0.53lbs. Though diminutive in size, the 3040 sports an Intel Atom X5 1.44GHz quad-core processor that supports up to 2GB DDR3 RAM and 8GB flash. The system also includes four USB ports (one that is USB 3.0) and two DisplayPort connections. Of course the Wyse 3040 is compatible with all major virtualization software including Citrix XenDesktop, Microsoft RDS and VMware Horizon.

May 31st, 2017 by Lyle Smith

The Synology DiskStation DS1517+ is a 5-bay NAS designed for encryption and intensive tasks. Powered by a Quad-core 2.4GHz CPU with AES-NI hardware encryption engine, the DS1517+ comes equipped with quad 1GbE LAN ports and up to 16GB DDR3 RAM (dual channel). Synology also quotes speeds of 1,165MB/s and 527.99MB/s in sequential reading and writing, respectively, and can be expanded from 50TB to a maximum of 150TB using 15 drives via two DX517 expansion units.